One of the complainants in a criminal investigation into allegations of physical and sexual abuse at Grenville Christian College is calling a 14-month probe into the private boarding school a "whitewash."
Grenville County Ontario Provincial Police announced Friday there will no charges laid in the investigation into historical abuse alleged to have occurred at the former school east of Brockville. The accusations of criminal wrongdoing by former staff were made by 23 students and were alleged to have occurred between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s.
"I don't understand it, how 23 people can file a complaint and it be whitewashed," said Tim Blacklock, 47, of Kingston in a telephone interview.
"It's disheartening, to say the least," he said. "You have to come to terms with the past and carry on."
Blacklock, who attended the private school run by Anglican priests in the mid-1970s, went to police with allegations he was held by a former staff member and beaten with a wooden paddle by another as punishment for smoking in 1976. He was 15 at the time.
"It was above and beyond what I believe to be corporal punishment," he said.
The outcome of the police investigation is not deterring former students like him from going ahead with a class-action civil lawsuit against Grenville Christian College and its former staff members.
"We're hoping the class-action suit will straighten everything out," said Blacklock.
"A lot of us were kids and we didn't tell our parents (of the alleged abuse)," he said. "This is so much not about money. I want some sort of recognition that something was wrong."
Another litigant in the class-action lawsuit said news the police won't file criminal charges has left former students determined to seek justice in civil courts.
"The old anger came back," said Marion Morton, of Toronto. "The old anger this could be done to us and kept secret. And there was a sense of betrayal.
They listen and then nothing gets done. As many times as we have come forward and nothing is done. Our last hope is this civil appeal."
"We were told so many times nobody would listen to us.
The fear was so drilled into us. I'm hoping people can overcome that fear. We're not that few in number."
Morton, 38, says she was pulled out of bed and forced to run every morning at 5 a.m. for an hour as a student at Grenville Christian College and subjected to teachings that described women as "whores" if they had any relationships with men outside of marriage. She attended the school between 1982 and 1989.
Accusations of cult-like religious activities and the abuse of former students came to light after Grenville Christian College shut its doors in August 2007.
The complaints of abuse led first to an investigation by the bishop of the Anglican diocese of eastern Ontario and then a criminal investigation by the OPP.
Two civil lawsuits have merged into one class-action lawsuit filed in Toronto. The school, as well as some former staff members, are named as defendants in the civil suits. None of the allegations has been proven in court.
Meanwhile, the fate of the stately school's stone buildings and its grounds is still uncertain. It was revealed at Augusta Township in September a developer purchased the property and intends to build a residential development on the sprawling 264-acre campus.
